


Asphodels and Lightning

by miraclemoon



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Episode: s02e06 Futamono, Eventual Romance, Hannibal is Hades, Hannibal visits Will in his dreams, M/M, Masturbation, Possessive Hannibal Lecter, Touch-Starved, will is persephone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-11-12 06:28:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18005606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraclemoon/pseuds/miraclemoon
Summary: "That beast, he smelled just like you. Like sulfur, deep from the earth, beneath the crust and buried amongst bones.” Will can't help but grow dizzy from the scent; it's exhilarating in every way he’s forced himself to hate. He can imagine it too clearly: the dark crypt of it all, filled with wandering souls poisoning the air with their anguish. The memory of snapping teeth and iron-strong jaws rushes back to mind.The Hades and Persephone Hannigram AU no one asked for





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Spring Equinox! And how else to celebrate this joyous occasion than to crawl out of my hole and post a mythology Hannigram AU. Enjoy~

Glowing sunlight stretches across the fields, over the glinting shores of shallow water. Will assumes the robe of a man as he walks through the outskirts of a nearby village, his fingers skimming across the bulbous grains of wheat as they sway against the flowing breeze.

“You were generous this year,” Jack says beside him, his hands settling low on his hips as he stares at the expansive landscape before him. He watches the villagers harvest their wheat from across the field, their baskets growing full. In the distance, Will can hear the laughter of a woman and her daughter from far away. 

“Even to the men in the mountain. Do you hear them?”

Will tries not to. It’s his job to feed them, to keep them breathing. If they live, then their prayers keep him and Jack alive. It's a pragmatic exchange with no room for greed. “It’s excessive,” he answers simply, his feet sinking into the firm soil. “I should go to them in visions, convince them to stop sacrificing their livestock. I gain nothing from dead sheep and they lose food.”

“So you’ve been to your altar,” Jack observes, pleased. Will can’t help but scoff.

“I can smell the blood from my forest; it’s unnecessary.”

“It’s _praise_ ,” Jack retorts, “A sign of a job well done. Anything beyond this is out of our hands - but for now, they’re well.” He turns to Will, bringing his hand over to squeeze at the man’s shoulder. “I couldn’t do this without you. You’ve saved lives, Will.”

Will resists the urge to shrink away under Jack’s grip. Instead, he glances back at the young woman in the field, watching the way sunlight glints against her dark hair, how exertion has reddened her cheeks. 

“Get some rest, Will. The olives won’t be ready until November.”

“Plenty of time for something to go wrong.”

“It won’t,” Jack affirms, with a certainty that Will hates. As though if he willed it, it would be. “Go, Will. Go home.”

So he does.

*/

He walks for hours that evening, through miles of wheat fields and over rocky terrain until he passes through a small village. Will knows this route by heart, remembers the days, long ago, when the soil across this land was brittle and barren; before any seed would take to the earth. He remembers the days before the village was even here.

The young woman and her mother from the fields are traveling several meters ahead of Will, carrying with them their baskets and the new supplies they collected from the neighboring town. Will can smell the molten heat of a craftsman on them, and he catches the glint of metal peeking from the cover of the young woman’s satchel. As they diverge from the main path, into the worn road that leads to their home, wind-chafed skin and blue eyes turn towards him as Will approaches. She smiles at him, a soft, welcoming thing, before she continues through the tall grass, hidden from sight. She’s grown since the last Will has seen her - she was merely an infant the last he had walked this path. When he's certain that no bandits will interfere during their walk home, he continues his way, through the outskirts of the young girl’s village and beyond into the accompanying forest.

When Will catches sight of almond trees over the horizon, he is overcome with a sense of joy that singularly comes with returning home. He steps in close into the northernmost tree, presses his forehead against the bark and cradles it with a tenderness he does not often know.

Home is where there is earth, but Will had spent his infancy here. The first creation he’d ever birthed were not flowers or wheat, but the heavyweight of thick bark and strong roots as they assumed the shape of an almond tree. He breathes into them, and he can feel their resulting groan, the leaves stretching as they cradle him close.

“I’m home,” he speaks softly into the encroaching silence of the forest, reaching into its branches and eating of the tree’s nuts.

 */

There is a burial ceremony several miles from Will’s home one night. It’s too difficult to ignore; the crying and prayers are incessant. The collective mourning of family and nearby villagers keeps Will awake that night, makes him dizzy with grief even though he does not know this girl.

“They found her in her bed,” Jack tells him that night, facing towards the direction of the ceremony.

“Tucked away?”

“Likely died in her sleep.”

Will isn’t so certain. When Will stares into the coiling smoke of her cremation as it curls into the evening sky, he sees the vision of a woman mounted on antlers, blood staining her gown.

 */

Gods should not interfere with the affairs of man, but when Will awakens one night, drenched in sweat with the visions of hunting knives and dark hair, he doesn’t think about the politics of it.

All he sees is blood, and his decision is instant.

He runs to the nearby village and pauses when he catches sight of the sequestered home of the Hobbs family. Adrenaline sharpens all his senses as a woman comes limping out from the doorstep, choking on her own blood before she goes tumbling forward into the warm earth. She's dead by the time Will takes hold of her, and he barges into the house, staggering through the living space until he enters into the kitchen. The young woman from the field is cradled in her father’s arms as he presses the knife to her throat, hysteria poisoning him as he locks eyes with Will. The man cuts into her, and Will charges forward as she falls to the ground, forcing his blade into the body of Garret Jacob Hobbs. He feels the man’s body still before it thrashes forward, and Will stabs him again, _again_ , until the man stumbles backwards, defeated.

As he sits immobile, the cold eyes of Mr. Hobbs stare into Will, unsettling something unknown and dark within him.

Will steps back, his breath coming in harsh and uneven, and he turns towards the young woman, panics when he sees the current of her blood gushing from her wound. Her short breaths fill the space, and Will shivers as he feels her blood warm the soil beneath them, the way it splattered like hot magma across his face. It sours his senses because he can taste her impending death, and he’s resentful of how powerless he is as he watches her die.

He tries to will her wound closed, grips her neck with shaken hands that have only known the creation of life, but the blood flows freely between the spaces of his fingers, and her wind-chafed skin is growing pale from having been bled dry.

Will is not capable of controlling the fate of man, cannot will them to life simply because he desires.

The most he can do is grow flowers on their grave.

*/

The earth smells of asphodels and lightning. Will wonders what trouble Zeus has gotten into to display such an overzealous show this evening, but he'll welcome any distraction that he can. Jack catches Will as he’s staring up at the strikes of lightning, counting each one, the splinters of light before it quickly dissolves into darkness.

Will can feel Jack’s eyes trace around the outline of Abigail’s grave. He sighs deeply.

“That’s not your job,” Jack says, as though Will doesn’t already know this. “The neighbors would have buried her, and then Hades would have done as he saw fitting. You shouldn’t have gone.”

“She was going to die anyways,” Will says, because she was. Thanatos had taken a lock of her hair, and Hermes was ready to escort her to the River Styx while Will clutched her lifeless corpse. Her fate was sealed.

“So why go?”

 _I don_ _’_ _t know_ , because Will truly doesn’t. The smell of her blood still fills his lungs, and Will finds himself grieving for the life of this girl. He was quick to bury her so Charon would transport her across the river, to her new home.

Jack watches him, and Will feels as though he’s being picked apart, fine china trying to be reassembled.

“I need to make sure you didn’t get too close,” Jack says, and Will hates the way Jack watches him, as though he is delicate and so terribly breakable. He runs his fingers through the soft earth covering Abigail's grave, and listens to the roar of thunder.

“Don’t expect a path of clarity, Jack.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will receives a gift. 
> 
> Based on the councilman morphed into a tree from Futamono.

Will is out in the fields when he feels it.

It’s the faint prickling of skin; akin to when the earth prepares for rain upon the first rumble of thunder. It rolls down his spine and into his very core, and his suspicions crest until he decides to leave the riverbed and return home.

Across the bright light of the field, he sees it.

A corpse.

Surprise is not what Will would describe feeling upon finding a man planted on his doorstep.  He’s seen his fair share of murdered men, has found bloated bodies drifting through the rivers and crumbling bones turning to dust in the fields. Death evades no one, so acceptance comes easily when it’s a daily occurence.

That’s not to say he’s not wary about the implications of this message, because that’s exactly what it is: a declaration.

There is something blatantly intentional about a damn corpse winding up near his forest, so he crosses the field to inspect the man with curiosity. Will steps in close to admire the man morphed into the tree, the bough splintering out from his arms as though his veins had turned into branches. Light still colors the man’s cheeks, though he has been bled dry. The organs had been removed, and an empty void fills the man’s abdominal cavity, dark where the light does not touch. What impresses Will most beyond the sight of a man embedded into a tree is the fact that the tree, one which Will remembers breathing life into as he pressed his fingers into the very soil as a young child, appears dead. There are no flowers or vegetation present, and fissures splinter off across the trunk, the bark smelling of rot.

Whoever had touched his beloved tree had not only stolen the life of the man he mounted onto it, but also robbed the earth surrounding it of its goodness. The surrounding grass crumbles into dust under Will’s weight, and Will would be furious if he weren’t so intrigued. He steps forward once, twice, and with every movement the withered earth below him fills again with moisture; soft and lush once again. He reaches his hand out, drags his fingertips across the crackly bark and brittle branches, across the man’s open chest and up the length of his arm. The man is colder than stone, and Will cannot remember the last time he had touched something so frightfully chilling.

This will not do.

Where Will’s fingertips touch, flowers blossom forth, filling the empty space through which the man’s organs once were. Vegetation and flora droop low and plentiful across the man’s shoulders, the perfume of pollen intermingling with decaying flesh. Will can only speculate how this man had come to be, so he closes his eyes, lets the pendulum swing, and allows himself to sink into the cavern of his own mind.

Will sees the man suspended in darkness, planted into the earth until his feet morphe into roots and branches split out from his forearms. A dark figure emerges from the branches overhead, but Will can only see the barest hint of antlers, of black tar flesh illuminated from the moonlight. The figure crawls down the length of the man until it tears into his chest, its teeth coming away bloody with strips of meat dangling from its lips. The feathered stag approaches from the fields and eats of the tree man’s flowers, devours his leaves. Will watches the stag and wendigo figure gorge themselves until it is utterly bare; bones and all.

“Who did this to you?” Will asks, his fingers coming away tacky with old blood when they press too closely to the opening of his abdomen. He can’t resist from looking closer, and Will searches for the tracks of teeth marks, if there are lesions from where the Wendigo tore flesh away with his jagged claws. Will finds nothing. Though not consumed, the man was certainly butchered.

Will sleeps that night beside the hollowed man, the smells of copper and flora soothing him to sleep.

*/

That night, Will dreams of foreign hands and the sweet, heady scent of cypress. Blades of grass cut into his cheek as writhes at the contact, and he breathes in deep until the figures scent sticks to the back of his tongue.

The man’s hands are certain, his touch electric as it smooths over the canvas of Will’s chest, fingers tracing the jut of his collarbone and down the length of his arms.

Will is bared under the moonlight, and for a moment he’s grateful for the accompanying breeze as it cools his fevered skin. Will is breathless as the phantom engulfs him, the dark figure leaning down to block the remaining ray of moonlight from Will’s sight. He stays there for a moment, frozen, as the figure’s calloused hand reaches down to press against the center of his chest; feeling for Will’s hammering heartbeat.

“I cannot deny my fascination,” the figure says. Will catches the slight purse of his lips as he smiles.  “I leave you a gift, and you respond in kin.”

“You left me a corpse.”

“Not many of this world would find comfort in the dead. Instead, you have taken refuge under this man’s shade, have kept him company through the night. Were you pleased to find him?”

Will sneaks a look at the corpse hanging above him, no less dead than he were when Will first found him.

“You killed my tree.”

“And that troubles you.”

“Might as well have tracked dirt in my living room while you were at it.”

“My apologies. I am more familiar with those long passed, I can be careless when handling the living.”

“You don’t strike me as a man who is careless.”

The figure tilts his head slightly, and Will can catch the amber glint of the man’s eyes, the way his hair falls across his forehead as he hovers over Will.

“What do you strike me as then?”

“Calculated. A man unaware of the weight of his actions wouldn’t sound so pleased when he returns to the crime scene. It didn’t have to die, yet you chose for it to. It was amusing.”

“Am I truly so terrible?”

“You butchered a man for a courtship.”

“Is that what this is?” The man’s voice is low, and he sounds positively smug. “How insolent of me for having harmed something of yours. You had cared for it since it was a sapling, nurtured it to health until it reached great heights, only to find it withered and impotent one day.”

Will’s lip twitches, trying not to remember that this tree was amongst one of the first he had ever cultivated as a young child. He is certain this man’s selection of it wasn’t coincidence.  “All things are meant to die.”

“Including the man. Would you not consider him immortal now? Has his glory in death not dwarfed his existence as a mere councilman?”

Will barks out a laugh. “Using men as ploys for your enjoyment? You’re no better than the bastards up in Olympus. The civilians are growing sick of being used as ploys for arrogant god's and their hubris. It’s no wonder they’re tearing down our altars.”

“Regardless of who they believe in, they will still end up at my doorstep. Judgement evades no one.”

The man leans down and brushes his lips against the highpoint of Will’s cheek, over the hollow of Will’s ear until his breath ghosts within. Will gasps, overwhelmed from his desire for clever hands and sharp teeth, how badly he wants to be burned from this mysterious man’s scalding touch. Will can feel the man’s breath against his neck as he travels lower, and he keens when the man kisses the delicate skin of his throat, can’t keep quiet as he sucks and drags his teeth over Will’s pale skin. When he bites down hard and sucks blotchy bruises into Will’s nape, Will can’t resist rutting against the man’s stomach, precome soaking through his robe. The man above him sighs, utterly pleased.

“You’ve matured decades ago. Are you truly untouched?” The man’s tongue swipes out to lick at Will’s fresh wound, Will unable to suppress his resulting shiver from the sensation.

“Recluses don’t make popular partners.”

“Neither do those who live amongst the dead.”

Will laughs at that, and he opens his mouth to speak when he’s suddenly at a loss for words, unable to formulate a proper sentence as the man’s hand wanders up Will’s thigh, dangerously close to his erection. Will can’t contain his resulting gasp, and he makes a frustrated noise when his hand pauses on his inner thigh, index finger tracing small circles against his skin.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Will breathes, his eyes fluttering shut as his head falls back into the soft, warm grass. It’s always warm where he is. Always has been. Will wishes for the days where he weren’t so bored of it, when he didn’t long for the discomfort of something new.

“Patience, dear boy,” the figure says, pressing his weight down until Will is trapped against him, “Fruit does not ripen in one evening.”

The man’s warm palm teases as it slips further, _further_ , until it is the last thing Will remembers.

When Will wakes, it is to tangled sheets and warm sweat against his skin. Overheated and strung up, he turns onto his back and tears his robe away, his hand finding his aching cock. His heart is thundering as he spreads his legs apart, the first touch to his aching length so blindingly good he can’t contain his sigh of relief. Will imagines the feel of wandering hands across his flesh as he pleasures himself, of how foreign it is to be subjected to fervent lust. He knows of many gods that have made fools of themselves in the pursuit for satisfaction, and Will could never understand, saw them as beasts cloaked in the shroud of gods. But now, Will is an uninhibited, desperate mess as he bites into the meat of his palm, his body flushed and heaving as he dances on the precipice. His hands wander to his neck, to the tender spot where the dreamed figure had mauled him, and when his fingers come away wet and tacky with smears of ichor, he is shocked by how immediate the spike of arousal is.

The smell of sulfur and old bones is the last thing Will imagines before he comes.


End file.
